Mamba was among the first samples of ransomware that encrypted hard drives rather than files that was detected in public attacks.Mamba leverages a disk-level encryption strategy instead of the conventional file-based one.

The first sample of Mamba Ransomware discovered in the wild were using a full disk encryption open source tool called DiskCryptor to strongly encrypt the data.

Researchers at Kaspersky Lab discovered a new wave of attack leveraging the Mamba ransomware that hit organizations in Brazil and Saudi Arabia.

“Authors of wiper malware are not able to decrypt victims’ machines. For example, if you remember the ExPetr [malware], it uses a randomly generated key to encrypt a victim machine, but the trojan doesn’t save the key for further decryption,” said Kaspersky Lab researcher Orkhan Memedov. “So, we have a reason to call it ‘a wiper.’ However, in case of Mamba the key should be passed to the trojan as a command line argument, it means that the criminal knows this key and, in theory, the criminal is able to decrypt the machine.”

Once the malware has infected a Windows machine, it overwrites the existing Master Boot Record, with a custom MBR and encrypts the hard drive using the DiskCryptor tool.

“Unfortunately there is no way to decrypt data that has been encrypted with the DiskCryptor utility, because this legitimate utility uses strong encryption algorithms,” explained Kaspersky Lab.

The last samples of Mamba ransomware show an unusual ransom note that instead of demanding for money like the original Mamba, it provides two email addresses and an ID number to be used to recover the encryption key.

The threat actor behind the new wave of Mamba ransomware attacks leverages the PSEXEC utility to execute the malware on the corporate network once it has penetrated it. PSEXEC is the same tool used by NotPetya to spread within target networks.

“It is important to mention that for each machine in a victim’s network, the threat actor generates a password for the DiskCryptor utility,” Kaspersky Lab said in its report. “This password is passed via command line arguments to the ransomware dropper.”